Advertising for online stores: what works and what eats the budget

I have worked with stores across categories: children's books, canvas art, homeware, premium devices. What follows repeats in nearly all of them.

Where to start if there is no advertising yet

1. Work out what you can pay for a customer. Not what feels acceptable, but what the margin survives after returns and shipping.
2. Track purchases, not clicks: pixel, events, order value. If the platform cannot see the amount, it optimises blind.
3. Build the product feed. The boring part everyone skips, and the one that delivers the cheapest sales.
4. Turn on remarketing before anything else. People who already viewed a product convert several times cheaper.
5. Only then cold traffic and creative testing.

Where stores lose money most often

What happens	What it costs	What to do
Measuring ROAS instead of margin	Turnover grows, profit does not	Count profit per order, not revenue
All spend on one bestseller	Growth hits a ceiling	Expand into categories through the feed
Returns not accounted for	Real margin below the planned one	Subtract returns from revenue
Product page leaves questions open	Traffic arrives, cart stays empty	Size, timing, returns, answered upfront
No free-shipping threshold	Order value lower than it could be	Set it just above your current average

What budget is needed

It depends on your price point, but as a guide: for the algorithm to exit learning you need roughly 800 euros or more per channel per month in Spain and the EU. Less does not mean slower; less often means the campaign never learns at all.

If there is no budget for two channels, do one properly. Split across Meta and Google, the same money usually performs worse than it would in one place.

What actually worked

• Children's books. The store ran on Instagram alone with around ten sales a month. After a proper site, analytics and managed traffic it reached 10 to 12 orders a day. Full case.
• Canvas art. A store built from nothing in two and a half months: Shopify, 150 works, card payments, fiscal receipts, advertising live. Full case.

FAQ

What counts as a good ROAS?

There is no universal number because it depends on your margin. At 30 percent margin a ROAS of 3 is breaking even; at 70 percent the same ROAS of 3 is solid profit. Start from what you can pay per customer, not from someone else's benchmark.

Meta or Google for a store?

Google captures people already searching for your product; Meta creates demand and works well for impulse and visual categories. With budget for one, start where demand already exists.

I am on Shopify, does that change anything?

For the better: the feed, the pixel and most product-page fixes happen without a developer.